Grain free dog food myth and is grain free bad for dogs

Grain free dog food myth and is grain free bad for dogs

Most pet parents generally want what's best for their pets and so we treat them as best we can we give them the best food that we can but what if I told you that some of the most popular foods that people are feeding their dogs are are actually causing more harm than good let's investigate hey everyone I'm dr. Holmes and welcome to another episode of pet doc Sherlock where we help people solve the mysteries of pets and there's a story going around in the news if you haven't heard it by now that grain free diets are actually causing problems in dogs now let's look back a little ways and think about just kind of dog food in general for many years marketers and ad campaign managers have been really smart and how to hook pet parents into purchasing their foods 

they'll use a cute little puppy they'll slap a celebrity chef on the bag they'll talk about how your dog is just like a wolf and release its inner wolf by feeding it this food and all of that's well and good and I've never had much of a problem with most commercial foods that are out there and then this term grain-free came out of seemingly nowhere and people started thinking that if I feed my dog green free it's better now I'm not gonna bash green free that's not what I'm here for I've never really cared that someone feeds grain free because it at one point we thought was not causing any harm I just didn't love that lots of companies we're getting people to spend extra for grain free when it really doesn't matter because let's face it is a teacup chihuahua really just like a wolf or a Maltese or a dachshund or a poodle or a golden retriever you name it they don't look like a wolf they don't act like a wolf we have genetically modified them have a particular breed that is very different than a wolf so it goes without saying that if they're different on the outside they're probably different to some degree on the inside as well the other thing is most grain free foods if you look at them also contain carrots and various other ingredients such as potatoes and beans and I'm pretty sure wolves aren't eating that either so the argument that it's like what a wolf eats and it will release your dog's inner wolf is kind of invalid the other is some people think that dogs have lots of allergies to grains and yes there are some dogs that have corn allergies and things like that but it's really uncommon people generally have allergies to grains dogs believe it or not tend to have an allergy to the protein source usually if they have a food allergy it's too chicken or beef so it's not even important to remove greens from an allergy perspective so I'm not really sure how or why the green free thing started but it did and it took off like crazy people were buying into the commercials and the ads and everything else and I don't blame them they were done very very well and the food companies have been able to make a lot of money off of it and again I had no problem with it except for the fact that it was more expensive and not necessary otherwise I was like you know what if it's working for you and your dog great I don't have a problem until recently when reports started coming out that dogs were starting to get sick because of grain free foods and I don't mean slightly sick very sick and the biggest issue was the disease that's occurring is really really hard to find and usually you don't find it until it's been going on for quite some time so what is this disease it's something called dilated cardiomyopathy really long words I'll abbreviate it to DCM we break it down it's not too complicated dilated just means kind of expanded cardio means heart Myo means muscle and APPA Thea is a disease of so it's a disease of the heart muscle that causes it to dilate now usually we see this in just a very select few breeds of dogs such as boxers Dobermans and 

Great Danes there are a few other breeds that pop up here and there but generally those are the ones that we see it in the most and so what occurred is cardiologists at various veterinary schools at UC Davis Tufts Cornell NC State and a couple of others started seeing DCM in breeds that we have never really seen it before and they started to think what in the world is happening I've seen several DCM cases in the last month and breeds I have never seen before and I'm a cardiologist this is what I do I've done it for years and I haven't seen this so they started digging a little deeper and trying to find some common thread between these breeds and they discovered really only one all of these dogs had been eating grain free food from the time they were very little to now and let's look a little bit at this little diagram I'm no artist by any means but I'll show you why DCM is so problematic so your heart is made up of four chambers you have two atrium and two ventricles at the bottom and the heart is one big muscle it serves one function to pump blood through the entire body so this in some dogs it can fit .

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